by Thomas Howard Elliot

Created on: February 26, 2008

Consider this a free lesson in photography. The basic principles that you should know to make your photographs more interesting and more effective. These concepts will work with both digital and film photography, as they are just about the actually photography side of things, so this guide is not one to use to purchase a camera, only to help you take better photos.

Light. Light is the principle determining factor of any photograph. Knowing how your camera operates is essential to exposing the film or digital sensor for the correct amount of time to achieve an even exposure. I will go into these next, but first I want to leave you not with wisdoms about light, but to let you know that as a photographer, light should be your all. Your religion should almost be the "Church of the Perfect Light". Morning light, as the suns angle in the sky softens its rays, is sweet light. The color is warmer and it seems to fall more like water than light. It's all in the lighting. Worship light.

Aperture. Now that you properly worship light, you need to know how to set your camera to match that light. Most SLR cameras, both film and Digital, will have a Manual (M) setting and an Aperture Priority setting (A or Tv) In Manual setting, it lets you choice the Aperture and the shutter speed (which we will come to later) In Aperture Priority setting, you set the aperture, and the camera sets the shutter speed to the nearest possible shutter speed that will expose the scene as metered (with the camera's built in light meter). The Aperture is the set of blades inside the lens that decide how much light is allowed to pass through the lens to the film plane or sensor plane. Aperture is a reverse scale measured in F-Stops. The widest, in most cases, is F/1.4. Then comes 2.8, 4, 5.6, and on down the line. The bigger the number, the smaller the opening, the less the light. Also, because of the shape of the opening, (nearly round), the amount of light also increases or decreases very quickly. In fact, a "stop" of light is either doubling the amount of light or halving it. So there is only half as much light reaching the sensor of the plane in a 2.8 as there is at 1.4. This means that the "faster" the lens means that the Aperture is a smaller number. So a F2.8 lens is much faster than an F/5.6. In fact an F/2.8 lets in 4 times the light as an F5.6 (doubled from 5.6 -4, then doubled again from 4 -2.8). This is probably the most confusing part of understanding the workings of photography. Keep

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